April 2018 The Reading for Understanding Initiative: Key Findings and Implications for States and Districts About This Report In May 2016 an Invitational Symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the symposium brought together 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the RfU initiative. The goal of the U.S. Department of Education-sponsored initiative was to accelerate research on reading across grades pre- k-12. In 2010, five grant projects were awarded to focus on learning and instruction and one project focused on assessment. In this policy report, the authors summarize key insights, themes, and inspiration from the symposium and RfU accomplishments to generate lessons learned, future challenges, and policy and practice recommendations for enhancing reading achievement across the educational developmental span from pre-k to secondary school graduation. The presentations of the research teams and videos of concluding panel discussions from the symposium can be found at https://www.ets.org/s/research/34239/ .
Transcript
April 2018
The Reading for Understanding Initiative:Key Findings and Implications for States and Districts
About This Report
In May 2016 an Invitational Symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the symposium brought together 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the RfU initiative. The goal of the U.S. Department of Education-sponsored initiative was to accelerate research on reading across grades pre- k-12. In 2010, five grant projects were awarded to focus on learning and instruction and one project focused on assessment.
In this policy report, the authors summarize key insights, themes, and inspiration from the symposium and RfU accomplishments to generate lessons learned, future challenges, and policy and practice recommendations for enhancing reading achievement across the educational developmental span from pre-k to secondary school graduation.
The presentations of the research teams and videos of concluding panel discussions from the symposium can be found at https://www.ets.org/s/research/34239/.
THE COUNCIL OF CHIEF STATE SCHOOL OFFICERS
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nonpartisan, nationwide nonprofit organization of public
officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, the District of Columbia,
the Department of Defense Education Activity, and five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions. CCSSO provides leadership,
advocacy, and technical assistance on major educational issues. The Council seeks member consensus on major
educational issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, federal agencies, Congress,
and the public.
COUNCIL OF CHIEF STATE SCHOOL OFFICERS
Carey M. Wright (Mississippi), President
Carissa Moffat Miller, Executive Director
One Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 700 • Washington, DC 20001-1431
• apply these research results to the development and evaluation of instructionalapproaches, curricula, technology, teacher professional development programs, andassessments to improve reading comprehension; and
• evaluate those programs in comparison to current practice in schools to determinewhether learning had been improved.
A network of over 160 researchers, across six research teams, worked on these issues for over
five years. Two teams tackled pre-k and elementary school populations, one addressed the
middle grades (4-8), and two teams focused on older adolescents across middle and high
schools. A sixth team focused entirely on assessment across the entire developmental span from
pre-k to grade 12.2
The RfU research teams carried out much of their work with and in schools. They developed
instructional programs, materials, and classroom-based assessments, and worked with teachers
and other education professionals to implement them. Some teams co-developed content
and programs with educators; other teams developed and delivered training and professional
development programs. All teams provided guidance regarding adaptation of the instructional
programs they designed, as well as how assessments could be used to foster learning
aims. However, it is not as if pre-existing school curriculum, instruction, and accountability
responsibilities simply were suspended. The research teams worked with (and sometimes around)
the constraints of the day-to-day practices, policies, and social norms of schooling.
Overall, the initiative was an ambitious endeavor. No other research program has ever attempted
to tackle a subject domain like reading comprehension across pre-k to grade 12 simultaneously.
Neither the researchers nor federal sponsors entered this initiative with naive expectations that
the challenges in national reading achievement that have persisted across decades could be
magically solved in five years of focused research. A more tempered measure of success was
sought, more specifically insights into
• the characteristics of interventions at each grade band that yield accelerations in thedevelopment of reading comprehension skills, particularly for struggling readers;
• the barriers that impede the use of effective approaches and interventions; and
• a more nuanced understanding of the reading comprehension challenges that shouldbe the focus of future research.
2 The six teams included Educational Testing Service (pre-k-12th assessment); The Ohio State University (pre-k-3rd); Florida State University (pre-k-4th); Strategic Education Research Partnership (4th-8th); the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (6th-12th); and the University of Texas at Austin (7th-12th).
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Overview of the RfU Research Projects
Five RfU teams tackled the challenge of building curriculum and instruction materials and
implementing them for pre-k to grade 12. The sixth team supported the others by developing
and evaluating a new generation of assessments of reading comprehension skills.
The pre-k and elementary teams focused their efforts on building the language resources
and related comprehension skills that are pre-requisite to and supportive of reading
comprehension skill development. That is, the main focus was never solely on decoding,
though all teams would note the essentiality of decoding instruction during these early years.
Pre-k-3 The Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC) studied the role
of language skills in listening and reading comprehension in children ages
4 to 8. They focused on grammar, vocabulary, and narration in order to
improve listening comprehension and subsequent reading comprehension.
Using their findings they developed a 25-week curriculum supplement
available in Spanish and English. Results from the first cohort of the
field-based randomized controlled trial (N=766 students across grades)
indicated large, consistent, and statistically significant effects on targeted
skills. https://larrc.ehe.osu.edu/
Pre-k-5 The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) developed integrated multi-
component instructional interventions to support students’ oral and text
comprehension and reading for understanding. This team found that effective
instructional practices on precursor skills increase skills and may shift children’s
growth in reading-related and reading skills, and that interventions need to
target multiple components of language in order to have broad impacts on
children’s skills. http://rfu.fcrr.org/
The middle and high school teams each focused extensively on using text to build
knowledge across disciplines, both of content and vocabulary, and using structured
discussions to facilitate learning and comprehension. The middle grades teams put additional
emphasis on argument and debate with goals of building perspective taking, reasoning,
and academic language skills, which in turn were needed to facilitate deep reading
comprehension. The high school teams emphasized reading and learning in the disciplines
(such as word recognition, decoding, and vocabulary) have also
been developed to further understand or qualify the performance of
students who may have basic reading skill difficulties that interfere with
comprehension performance.
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Key Insights and Implications for States and Districts
This brief report represents the authors’ view of
the insights gained from the initiative that are most
relevant to state and district leaders. The report is
divided into sections based on the major strands
were used to organize the National Symposium on
Reading for Understanding:
• Assessment
• Curriculum & Instruction
• Professional Development
• Implementation
Each section starts with a brief summary of the
research undertaken by the RfU teams. Then
recommendations for state and district leaders are
provided based on the key insights gained from
the six research projects.
Assessment
This report begins with assessment because it
represents the starting and culminating point of
any learning and instructional cycle and, if properly
conceived, can also be used formatively to guide
and enhance the instructional program.
• The work of the ETS-led assessment team focused on two types of assessment,scenario-based assessments (SBA), which require the application of complexreading comprehension skills, and components assessments which measure discretefoundational reading skills (see insert for definitions and go to www.ets.org/research/topics/ reading_for_understanding/ for more information about the ETS RfU Project).
Each of the other five research teams also developed assessments, primarily classroom-based such as quizzes and discussion questions, which targeted skills where gaps were identified (e.g., academic language, perspective taking, inference making, progress monitoring).
These projects found that a combination of carefully designed and utilized assessments can facilitate, guide, and enable effective instructional approaches and accelerate learning.
All the evidence suggests that some percentage of students continues to struggle mastering foundational skills through to secondary school, thwarting learning from text in the content
Scenario-based assessments (SBAs) are tests that measure, model, and support reading comprehension in a simulated project-like environment. Students are provided with a purpose (making a decision, solving a problem, or applying what they learn to a new situation) for reading a collection of thematically-related materials, as they are asked to evaluate and synthesize information.
For example, in one SBA that requires about one class period to administer, students are asked to decide whether to put a community garden in an empty lot (the overarching goal). They read about what community gardens are, the pros and cons of their use, and perspectives from others in the community. They then represent this information in a flyer to inform the community about what they learned.
Component assessments are tests that measure particular foundational sub-skills (such as decoding and reading fluency) that enable students to “get the words off of the page.” Component assessments are useful for instructional decision-making, primarily when there is any reason to think students are at-risk of failing to achieve at or above grade level.
areas. Component assessments that measure foundational skills complement higher level comprehension measures by helping teachers to distinguish weakness in component skills from weakness in higher level comprehension processes. This distinction can lead to a better alignment between students’ needs and instruction. Knowledge of the origin of the difficulty can be directed toward remediating the problem if both types of assessments are provided. It should be noted that while both types of assessments will benefit English language learners, new assessments specifically targeted to second language needs should be developed to focus instruction.
Recommendations for State and District Leaders Regarding Assessment
• Provide assessment activities mimic quality learning and instruction. Goodteaching practices should align with the processes required in assessment tasks.While preparing students for taking state reading literacy tests is a necessaryrequirement, the measurement priority during a high stakes assessment is to sampleskills broadly, not for students to learn the text content in order to meet a learninggoal or reason about an issue. However, in school or classroom assessments it isa priority that students learn from and reason about what they read, as well aspractice the skills and strategies necessary to achieve complex goals. In statewidesummative assessments as well as those used at the district, school, and classroomlevels, tasks designed to mimic learning activities will provide meaningful guidancefor tailoring curriculum and instruction across grades and across school subjects.Which leads us to the next recommendation.
• Provide assessment activities that include complex, goal-directed tasks whereacademic learning from text is a primary goal. Answering isolated questionsabout a single passage is not the same as learning and reasoning about contentknowledge from text. The goal of most reading in school is to learn new subjectknowledge. A second common goal, in and out of school, is to learn enoughabout a topic or issue to make a decision, solve a problem, understand a point ofview, or argue a point (e.g., Should I apply to this academic program or this job?).For learning from text to occur, text content must be integrated with one’s priorknowledge, creating new knowledge. Further, providing a complex goal (e.g.,see Community Garden example in call-out box) demands that students allocateattention to appropriate skills and strategies necessary to the task. (See Curriculumand Instruction, below, for further discussion.)
• Demand not only transparency in what the assessment measures and the levelof performance expected, but also tests worth teaching to - not merely reliableand valid score reports. This information is essential to ensuring that teaching andtesting are aligned. Test scores are part of an assessment’s value, but educatorsalso need to understand the construct (what the test was designed to measure) andthe test design (how the items and tasks are designed to measure the construct) tomake effective use of the results to tailor instruction.
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• Make users of test scores aware of how motivation and backgroundknowledge mediate assessment performance and score interpretation. Userscannot automatically assume that every student score is a true estimate of theirreading ability. Low or high knowledge of topics presented on a test can resultin misinterpretations of the strengths or weaknesses in comprehension skillsunderlying that performance. Further, the instructional approach one recommendsmay differ significantly based on whether the examinee expends high or low effortwhen taking the test, or if other emotional states (e.g., anxiety) impact performance.When feasible, use methods for measuring knowledge or motivation during a test,to estimate the impact of these critical comprehension correlates.
• Prioritize disciplinary and multiple source reading in assessments. There is asignificant mismatch in the passages and questions used in current assessmentsversus the variety of comprehension skills required to learn from text in academic(and non-academic) environments. The cognitive strategies used to understand andlearn from a science article differ from those applied to a historical document or anovel. Assessments should capture this fundamental difference across academicdomains. Further, given the proliferation of information on the internet, theability to evaluate credibility, understand multiple perspectives, and corroborateinformation across sources is an essential 21st century skill to assess.
• Prioritize computer- or web-based assessments, because most reading andlearning in the world and in the future will take place on electronic devices.3
Paper-only reading comprehension is inadequate preparation for the workplace andpost-secondary technology-based learning environments in today’s society. Further,computer-assisted assessment affords multiple advantages in administration,construct coverage, cost and time efficiency, and scoring, which are impossible tomimic in paper-only assessments.
• [Districts] Prioritize the identification of students with foundational skillweaknesses in reading, especially beyond grade four. Component assessments aredesigned for this purpose. Identifying the proportion of at-risk or struggling readers isa key step needed for district and school level planning for professional development,interventions, and associated policy decisions. For identified at-risk or strugglingstudents, reading assessments should measure foundational reading skills in tandemwith higher level reading comprehension skills through early secondary schooling oruntil foundational skills are commensurate with grade level expectations.
Curriculum & Instruction
As noted, five RfU teams tackled the challenge of building curriculum and instruction
materials and then implementing them for pre-k to grade 12. We note that no RfU team
3 This will also necessitate that states, in partnership with districts, ensure all students have access to technology within the learning environment in order to develop digital literacy skills.
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started with the premise of teaching to the common core state standards or state standards,4
though the instructional programs produced would, in retrospect, be found to be consistent
with these standards.
Synthesizing insights for curriculum and instruction across all of the RfU projects in just a few
pages clearly requires over-simplification of the richness of their accomplishments. However,
we can codify a few key, priority insights. In doing so, we first need to clarify our terminology.
In common usage, the terms reading and comprehension are sometimes used interchangeably
and sometimes used to distinguish sets of skills. Reading ability often is used to mean what
we have called foundational skills, that is, the set of visual processing skills that get the words
off the page into one’s head. These skills include decoding, word recognition, vocabulary,
and syntax, and culminate in fluent reading. If there is an assumption of understanding or
comprehension, it is usually at a basic or literal comprehension level.
Comprehension could be thought of as something simple, like literal recall or recognition of
the gist of what one has read, as referred to in the previous paragraph. But this is not what is
meant or measured in reading comprehension tests across grades. We would not have nearly
30 percent of students below basic comprehension levels by this simple definition. Rather,
comprehension refers to a more complex construct of understanding what one reads, and
that is what is measured on assessments. At a minimum, this construct of comprehension
requires sophisticated language processing (vocabulary and grammar), inference, reasoning,
perspective taking, and interpretation. It requires regulating a set of skills and strategies
toward goals of building new knowledge, making a decision, solving a problem, or applying
what one learns. Note that this description of comprehension applies to reading (visual
processing of texts) or listening, or comprehending any mixture of media (e.g., animation, film).
While the RfU teams differed in the specific definitions of comprehension they used to guide
their research projects, they would all agree that some mixture of these higher order processes
is required to read for understanding.
With this in mind, we highlight four common misconceptions that should to be addressed by
the education community:
1. Reading (i.e., print-based foundational skills) should be the sole or even
primary focus of early elementary reading instruction (pre-k through grade 4).
While foundational skills (e.g., decoding and reading fluency) must continue
to be a priority, comprehension development is an equivalent priority. This
comprehension development is mediated through oral language comprehension
and development. Individual differences in vocabulary and the sophistication of
language skills are wide among children already at pre-school, and this gap needs
to be addressed as soon as formal schooling commences and continued until the
gap is narrowed.
4 The call for proposals for the RfU initiative was released before the common core state standards.
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2. Reading comprehension instruction is complete by grade 4 or 5. We have long sent
a mixed message to students (and teachers) by treating reading comprehension
as if it is a skill set that is mastered in elementary school, even as we set content
standards and outcome tests of reading literacy through high school. The complex
construct of reading comprehension or reading for understanding as measured
across pre-k through grade 12 needs to continue to be explicitly developed
through middle and high school, addressing the varying cognitive strategies
applied to reading in each discipline.
3. Literacy involves only the ability to gain knowledge or information through text. The
research conducted and reviewed through the RfU projects demonstrates that the
application of language, academic vocabulary, reasoning, and the social contexts of
literacy are essential elements to developing and applying literacy skills.
4. Comprehension is a solitary activity. Reading is often thought of as an activity
involving one reader and one text, but comprehension is more than this solitary
interaction; it is a social activity that involves listening skills, the sharing and co-
constructing of ideas and perspective taking. Rich literacy environments involve
students and teachers interacting to scaffold understanding and provide feedback
on each other’s ideas. An understanding and appreciation of varying points of view
and perspectives are part of the interpretive fabric of reading for understanding.
To address these misconceptions, we structure our recommendations for state and district
leaders around three shifts:
1. instructional focus on reading comprehension, pre-k-12;
2. the integration of complex literacy skills; and
3. greater emphasis on reading to learn.
Recommendations for State and District Leaders regarding Curriculum & Instruction
• Ensure early elementary and pre-school curricula focus on languagedevelopment, comprehension, and knowledge-building, as well asfoundational reading skills. While foundational skills (e.g., decoding andreading fluency) must continue to be a priority, comprehension development isan equivalent priority. This comprehension development is mediated throughoral language and visual media. Individual differences across children invocabulary and the sophistication of language skills are wide, even at the start ofschooling. Enhancing language comprehension should include building academiccontent knowledge in science, social studies, and so forth. If children are moresophisticated users and producers of language, with adequate knowledge ofacademic domains, it may mediate the so-called fourth grade slump seen inreading comprehension tests.
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• Ensure schools have the resources and policies that enable middle and highschools to address the needs of students who fail to achieve mastery offoundational reading skills. Most students who fail to achieve comprehension alsoshow only adequate to weak foundational skills. Perhaps not weak enough to beclassified as reading or learning disabled, but well below average for their gradelevel. They are often slow and non-fluent when reading grade level texts. They donot recognize or decode words automatically and are slow to learn new vocabularyfrom texts on their own. They expend their attention and memory resourceson these lower level processes at the expense of higher level comprehensionand reasoning processes. They are reluctant readers; they do not read widelyor frequently on their own. State and district leadership is needed when a highprevalence of such students is clustered in middle and high schools, because thoseschools may not have structures and expertise in place to intervene or remediatefoundational and comprehension skills, and meet curriculum content standardssimultaneously at scale.
• Ensure an instructional focus on reading comprehension beyond elementaryand through secondary schooling. As students progress through middle andhigh school, instruction should include the specialized ways of reading, thinking,and conveying information needed for each of the content areas. This implies thatcontent area teachers at all grade levels should include the reading comprehensionstrategies used in their subject area. Whenever content is being learned fromtext (print, digital, or other), instructional support for the necessary readingcomprehension skills should be embedded.
• Ensure that multiple literacy skills are integrated within curricula andinstructional materials and provide exemplars. State and district leaders play acritical role in setting expectations and providing exemplars for quality curriculaand instructional materials. While at times it may be appropriate to teach readingcomprehension in isolation, most often advanced literacy skills—includinglistening, language, vocabulary, perspective-taking—should be integrated incontent area instruction, as the skills and strategies necessary to achieve largerlearning goals such as how to build new knowledge with texts, to reason anddebate an issue, or to solve a problem with texts.5 It follows, then, that
o The development of content area instructional units should involveboth literacy teachers and content area teachers to ensure students are supported in the development of reading comprehension skills across the pre-k-12 continuum.
5 As an analogy, think of how a science teacher considers it their responsibility and mission to teach research skills appropriate to the science discipline. In chemistry this includes using beakers, flasks, and burners to mix chemicals or prepare solutions; in biology, this might include dissections or growing cultures, etc. Now think of reading in the disciplines as another research skill needed to learn chemistry or science knowledge and reasoning from text sources about those sciences.
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o Academic language development should be facilitated concurrently with reading comprehension development across the entire span of schooling. This variant of language is the currency of learning environments and should be practiced/developed productively, both in classroom discussions and in written communication. Informal, conversational language use should also be encouraged, but helping students to learn and command an academic register of language use will strengthen their confidence and competence in future learning (and workplace) settings.
o Realistic texts of varying types and formats should be incorporated across the curriculum, including fiction and non-fiction, print, digital, and others, to reflect the many sources of information, inspiration, and communication they will encounter as adults. Textbooks and trade books written explicitly for educational use serve a didactic purpose. But the world of literacy beyond the school is much richer and varied than the controlled and closely edited texts prepared by educational publishers and test companies. The internet better represents the richness of literacy the student can expect beyond schools. While access to technology in today’s classrooms can be limited by school funding, failure to integrate technology with learning underrepresents the reading comprehension construct and may increase the achievement gap. In addition, technology affords access to information, an opportunity to exercise critical thinking skills, and can be used to scaffold and enrich literacy environments.
o Curricula should encourage language-rich environments with discussion and debate of the ideas and content found in texts as a primary pedagogical vehicle for increasing comprehension. The social context of literacy use and practice should be seamless and synonymous with the practice of learning to comprehend individual text sources. Strong readers often self-explain in their own heads when constructing and reasoning about texts. However, this internal dialogue should be modeled externally for less skilled readers and scaffolded through social interactions.
o As implied above, instruction should directly address the development of thinking and reasoning skills concurrent with comprehension development across the lifetime. This development should occur even before students can read independently. Instruction in the content areas, including English classes, needs to include the specific thinking and reasoning strategies required in that discipline. The act of reasoning or thinking about text itself is a knowledge-building activity. In this sense, it both supports comprehension and is comprehension.6
6 It is often overlooked that reasoning generates knowledge, it is not just a process applied to text content, after knowledge is acquired. When one reasons about or reflects on a text, or compares and contrasts ideas on a topic, one generates inferences or re-organizes what one knows about the topic. This is new knowledge that was perhaps not ever represented explicitly in the source texts.
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o The context and setting of literacy practices within instructional units should be purposeful, goal directed, and engaging. Students should not read to simply answer basic reading questions, but to solve problems or make decisions as they engage in rich literacy activities. Comprehension is a means to an end, not merely an end in itself.
• Ensure that the texts used within instruction increase in reading level, complexity,and length across the grades. To be prepared for the reading demands of post-secondary education, students should be called upon to develop fluency and staminawith language as represented in print sources through the inclusion of texts ofincreasing length, complexity, and volume that are commensurate to their grade levels.
• Monitor and develop policies to support dispositions such that students seeengagement in print reading as natural and necessary to their personal andsocial development. This goes beyond appreciation for literature or a joy of reading.Increasingly, easy access to social media, smart phones, and streaming video arecompeting with extended print reading for students’ time and engagement. For manypurposes, these alternate media (which often include some limited print readingrequirements and navigation skills) are sufficient for learning or solving a problem(e.g., how-to videos). States and districts need to show leadership and devise creativestrategies that schools and teachers can use to engage students. Each RfU teamaddressed motivation and engagement. No simple answer emerged, though astrong focus on goal directed, relevant learning activities that engage students in bigconceptual questions in social learning environments may be sufficient in the near termfor most classrooms. However, the long-term problem of students disengaging fromreading and learning in their school careers is a problem that needs to be addressed.
• [Districts] Ensure that all content area instruction includes “reading to learn” (fordistricts specifically). “Reading to learn” requires the student to extract and evaluateinformation from texts, identify the big, conceptual ideas across texts and not merelythe ‘main ideas’ of individual texts, reason, make inferences, and generalize theirknowledge beyond the text and topic in question. Some of the strategies employedvary cross disciplines. Therefore, a disciplinary approach to reading should be used,particularly at the middle and high school levels, so that all students learn to “read tolearn” in each discipline.
Professional Development
The implications of the research conducted under RfU are quite significant for teacher preparation
programs and for state and district professional development programs. First and foremost, it is
now clear that reading proficiency should be the responsibility of every teacher (not just reading
and ELA teachers), as well as every educational professional and school administrator. This includes
content area teachers, whose aspirations should not only be about building students’ content
understanding, but also developing the specific skills used within that discipline to learn from and
critically evaluate content.
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Recommendations for State and District Leaders Regarding Professional Development
• [States] Require that teacher preparation incorporate research-based,
discipline-specific reading comprehension training into the pre-service training
of all teachers. Also, because the field of cognitive science is rapidly developing,
states should require teacher preparation programs to update their curriculum to
reflect new advances to comprehension instruction as they are developed.
• [States and Districts] Require in-service teachers who are not proficient in
the instruction of discipline-specific reading comprehension skills to engage
in professional development and then incorporate them into instruction.
Comprehension instruction should reflect the expectations of the discipline.
Consequently, content area teachers will need expert knowledge about how to
teach reading for understanding in their discipline. For instance, teachers and
students should read history texts in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary
expectations (e.g., distinguish primary from secondary sources); this is different
from how they should read a science text.
During the RfU project, professional development took on many forms from assistance with
implementing interventions to co-development of materials and programs to knowledge transfer
on the latest best practices. District leaders may want to require principals to identify faculty/
staff with primary responsibility for reading literacy development and organize annual, common,
school-wide reading literacy development plans with monitoring of progress. A parallel but less
intensive plan could be implemented for faculty-wide reading literacy development for all other
content area faculty.
The RfU projects identified some insights into key elements of such professional
development offerings:
o Receptive and productive development of academic language should be
a priority, especially with underserved groups whose language experiences
outside of school may diverge from the academic language use expected in
school.
o Knowledge building across topic and subject areas using rich oral language
vocabulary, as well as visio-graphic materials should continue to be a priority,
with attention being given to how this knowledge can be integrated with text
reading and comprehension.
o Social interactions and communication that foster perspective taking
and multiple points of view should also be developed as pre-requisites to
advanced comprehension skills. Students need to be agents of their own
learning, but also collaborators in a socially constructed environment.
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o The foundations for evaluating the credibility and integration of multiple sources (whether text, oral, or visual) should also be introduced, as preparation for more advanced multiple source reading comprehension.
o Teachers should keep up to date on the forms, genres, devices, and uses of digital technologies, as that is the reading literacy world they are preparing students to enter. While the type and prevalence of devices and displays (e.g., laptops, tablets, smart phones, white boards), communication platforms (e.g., email, blog, twitter, snapchat), and resources (e.g., world wide web, Wikipedia) continue to change and expand at a dizzying pace, educators must do their best to prepare children from the earliest ages to be flexible in their approach to learning and adapting to the dynamic literacy environment of our age. This requires a mindset for integrating both formal reading and writing contexts with more informal and dynamic digital environments.
o Teachers and educators need to enhance their ability to create language rich environments and discussions that foster language development and listening comprehension, as well as reading comprehension. In the early grades, language development and listening comprehension instruction should be done even before students have learned or mastered reading of printed text.
Implementation
If continuous improvement and enhancement in reading literacy is to ever be achieved, then
there must be mechanisms that allow solutions to be tested within classrooms, evaluated,
implemented more broadly, and sustained over time.
The RfU research teams worked with schools that had a need to enhance reading outcomes
for their student populations. On the whole, each of the RfU projects brought technical
expertise, ready to use professional development, curriculum and instructional content,
evaluation tools, and monetary resources to schools. Each team did their best to be
accommodating to the curriculum and logistical needs of participating schools and districts.
Yet each team faced multiple barriers to implementing their instructional programs—trade-
offs that sometimes compromised the evaluation of the efficacy of the programs. As of the
writing of this report, teams were less than optimistic that schools would be able to sustain
the instructional programs they put in place beyond the duration of the projects.
Imagine that we had solid evidence that the instructional programs implemented by the
research teams would be effective. What would it take for them to become instantiated
and institutionalized in the schools? It is toward this aim that we offer the following
recommendations for district leaders, as well as the state leaders who advise and
support them.
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Dis
tric
ts
Recommendations for State and District Leaders Regarding Implementation
• Ensure the rules, regulations, and policies that govern school organizationand schedules accommodate implementation and sustainability of newprograms designed to enhance student achievement. The role of districtleadership in transforming the teaching of language and literacy will beessential to implementing and sustaining change. Coverage of the curriculum isimportant, but content cannot really be learned or mastered absent advancedcomprehension skills needed to sustain and enhance disciplinary learning. Sometime should be set aside for exploring new approaches for student learning andprofessional development.
• Encourage curriculum design research that collaboratively engages educatorswith researchers and provides time to explore and implement new approachesfor improving reading. For innovation in research to be implemented andsustained in schools, a different relationship between educators and researchis required. The approach needs to take into account not only the logistics ofimplementing a study, but also factors impacting the likelihood of instantiating asustainable change.
• [Districts] Integrate the expectation of innovation and change into policiesand plans. While structure and routine schedules are important for the success ofany institution, a mindset for innovation and improvement is important for keepingpace with a dynamic learning environment.
• [Districts] Monitor how well change is sustained over the long term. Reading isa complex skill that develops over time; changes are gradual and growth is slow.Educators should explore the use of new measures that can capture smaller, morerealistic changes in student growth and monitor more modest changes over time.
19
The Reading
for Und
erstanding Initiative: K
ey Finding
s and Im
plications for States and
Districts
Conclusion
The work of the RfU initiative has not yet concluded. While all six project teams have finished their
grants, the gathering of and reporting on the data collected will go on for years, as well as the
development and dissemination of the instruction and assessment products that were initiated. For
example, the National Academy of Educational is working on a synthesis of the RfU project, with
reports and supplemental monographs on specific issues forthcoming (https://naeducation.org/
